No smoking. No thinking.

About a decade ago or maybe a little more, the European Union mandated the scare-labelling of cigarette packs. Per that mandate, two-thirds of the face and back of the pack had to be occupied by a scary picture: a tiny little coffin with a man and a woman standing forlornly over it, or a woman coughing blood into a tissue, or a man in an intensive care unit with a woman and girl next to him.

The idea was obvious, of course — scare smokers away from their bad habit. The idea, as any smoker would know, was also exceptionally dumb. Smokers know it’s a bad habit. We feel it in our lungs every single day or rather, we did until some of us switched to alternatives but this is not the point of this post.

The point is that the central EU government mandated those scary pictures, which were, in ironic fact, often inadvertently funny, and it also mandated warnings on the cigarette packs. “Smoking kills”. “Smoking causes cancer/erectile dysfunction/fertility problems/everything bad you can imagine happening to your body.”

During my recent holiday, as I sat on the ground and picked chickpeas, I found myself thinking about those labels and those warnings, and then, while I swooped down on a chickpea that had dared fall to the ground instead of my hand, I thought about the “human activity causes climate change” claim.

I think it has been demonstrated repeatedly and empirically that human activity does not “cause climate change”. What human activity has caused is habitat destruction, river and ocean pollution, and a lot of work has been done over the past few decades to remedy these and minimise them going forward, at least in some parts of the world.

In very much the same way, smoking doesn’t “cause cancer”. What smoking does is increase — in a great many cases significantly — the risk of the smoker developing certain types of cancer. It sounds like it’s the same thing but it’s not. What smoking causes, directly, straightforwardly and undisputedly is COPD, vascular, and heart problems.

But it’s certainly better to not smoke, so what’s the problem with a little bit of a scare, you might say. I guess it would then take you a quarter of a second to add “Wait a minute…”

Yes, this is precisely the problem with a little bit of scare — it can be used for less benevolent purposes than discouraging people from consuming nicotine- and tar-containing rolls of burning plant leaves that make them sick.

There is a whole generation out there that believes if you smoke regular cigarettes you will die of cancer. 100%. The same generation thinks smoking marijuana is cool and harmless, failing to acknowledge the fact that both tobacco and marijuana are plants and when dry plants burn they release carcinogens. Sound familiar?

Internal combustion engine cars destroy the planet because they generate emissions but EVs are clean and pure, and have never been within ten miles of an emitting piece of equipment in their lives.

The principle is exactly the same as with tobacco and marijuana. It’s not a question of bad versus good habit. It’s a question of moving money from Producer A to Producer B. It sounds embarrassingly lame as an explanation but there it is.

The other climate scare tactics are also identical to the anti-tobacco ones. Because nobody will just quit because of some scary picture on a pack of fags, governments simply started taxing tobacco products more.

Because nobody would willingly consume less energy, governments are effectively taxing all energy more, so we are forced to curb our consumption.

It’s the simplest yet one of the most effective tactics for discouraging people from using a product. If that fails, just ban the damn thing, as New Zealand did with cigarettes.

Some climate activists love to draw parallels between Big Tobacco and Big Oil. These parallels are just sitting there in plain sight, ready to be used, abused, and misused.

Both knew their products do bad things to people but kept quiet about it, they argue. Well, Big Tobacco actually actively lied about it but who cares. Both hook people on their products creating an addiction nearly impossible to kick. Well, Big Oil’s products are in fact essential for civilisation unlike Big Tobacco’s products but who cares.

Both are a plague on this world and we need to get rid of them as quickly as we can because they’re evil. Meanwhile, we’d smoke a joint — or vape some THC oil — to calm our nerves rattled by yet another protest flush with synthetic-fibre clothes, plastic jewellery, petroleum-derived paints, and epoxy resin.

Smoking is bad for you, so we’ll ban it. Driving is bad for you, so we’ll ban it. You cannot be trusted to know what’s good or safe for you, so we’ll tell you, show you scientific research that proves it and you will believe us because you have got to trust the science. Smoking causes cancer and hydrocarbons cause climate change. Incidentally, obese is pretty and healthy.

Smokers are notorious for having a counter-argument for every — sensible, logical — argument made against smoking. It’s a kind of sport for us. Lung cancer? Oh, please, I know someone who died of lung cancer and had never smoked in her life.

Heart attack? What about obesity, eh? COPD? Well, we’ve all gotta die of something, right? And by the way, my godmother smoked heavily for 60 years and died at 87 of natural causes, so there. Smoking kills? Well, so does stupidity and it kills more.

Decent, non-smoking citizens would roll their eyes at that but the thing is, all these counter-arguments are all valid. Lung cancer is not exclusively reserved for smokers. It is a lot more prevalent among them but the majority of smokers do not die of lung cancer. They die of other causes that are very often causally related to smoking. Obesity is a huge risk factor for about as many conditions as smoking but we are currently trying to make obesity the new pretty. And so on.

There is a running joke among smokers that if you go to the doctor, for whatever reason, you shouldn’t tell them you smoke because the moment you do, they’d attribute whatever is ailing you to smoking. Again, sound familiar?

There is no longer natural weather, everything is climate change-induced, including dehydration and heart attacks, even visual impairment, and we need to stop this climate change by, well, quitting most of the things that make us feel good. Incidentally, these things also help keep us alive and in reasonable comfort.

If the textbook worked with tobacco, why not use it with things like food, heat, and meat protein? Who cares if there’s a huge big, glaringly obvious difference between them? Nobody will notice because we’ve got the scientific research to prove there is little difference, if there is a difference at all. Nobody will notice because they’re scared and we’re going to keep them this way for as long as we need to.